Commit 4a4e6893aa, which introduced this
mechanism, failed to account for the fact that the RECORD pseudo-type
uses transient typmods that are only meaningful within a single
backend. Transferring such tuples without modification between two
cooperating backends does not work. This commit installs a system
for passing the tuple descriptors over the same shm_mq being used to
send the tuples themselves. The two sides might not assign the same
transient typmod to any given tuple descriptor, so we must also
substitute the appropriate receiver-side typmod for the one used by
the sender. That adds some CPU overhead, but still seems better than
being unable to pass records between cooperating parallel processes.
Along the way, move the logic for handling multiple tuple queues from
tqueue.c to nodeGather.c; tqueue.c now provides a TupleQueueReader,
which reads from a single queue, rather than a TupleQueueFunnel, which
potentially reads from multiple queues. This change was suggested
previously as a way to make sure that nodeGather.c rather than tqueue.c
had policy control over the order in which to read from queues, but
it wasn't clear to me until now how good an idea it was. typmod
mapping needs to be performed separately for each queue, and it is
much simpler if the tqueue.c code handles that and leaves multiplexing
multiple queues to higher layers of the stack.
The shm_mq mechanism was built to send error (and notice) messages and
tuples between backends. However, shm_mq itself only deals in raw
bytes. Since commit 2bd9e412f9, we have
had infrastructure for one message to redirect protocol messages to a
queue and for another backend to parse them and do useful things with
them. This commit introduces a somewhat analogous facility for tuples
by adding a new type of DestReceiver, DestTupleQueue, which writes
each tuple generated by a query into a shm_mq, and a new
TupleQueueFunnel facility which reads raw tuples out of the queue and
reconstructs the HeapTuple format expected by the executor.
The TupleQueueFunnel abstraction supports reading from multiple tuple
streams at the same time, but only in round-robin fashion. Someone
could imaginably want other policies, but this should be good enough
to meet our short-term needs related to parallel query, and we can
always extend it later.
This also makes one minor addition to the shm_mq API that didn'
seem worth breaking out as a separate patch.
Extracted from Amit Kapila's parallel sequential scan patch. This
code was originally written by me, and then it was revised by Amit,
and then it was revised some more by me.
Robert Haas